I highly recommend planning Christmas 2008 on paper! The Mini-Budget Form (Excel) is a great tool to use to plan your Christmas spending.

Here's an example of how to use the Mini-Budget for planning Christmas. I have entered the amount that we plan to spend on each item for Christmas. This helps me understand the amount needed for Christmas.

You can see that "Cash – Expenses" shows a RED $1,080. To make it GREEN, I enter $1,080 in the "Cash Budgeted" line.

I know that I have experienced sticker-shock when I have put together my initial mini-budget for Christmas! The great thing about planning ahead is that I still have the opportunity to change how much I will spend!

So, go ahead and plan for Christmas 2008. Yes, you will be weird. Yes, no one else in your family is doing it. BUT, you will have a plan and be able to pay CASH for this year's Christmas! How many of your friends and family will be able to say that?

One Response to “REMINDER: Christmas is in 308 days!”

Great tip as always, Joe. My wife and I put aside $75.00 every month for Christmas. But we also put aside money every month for Personal Care (haircuts), Gifts, vehicle related expenses (registration, driver’s license renewals, oil changes, tires), and Water/Sewer. All of these are intermittent expenses that do not occur every month but we know they are coming. We have setup separate ING savings accounts for each since ING makes it easy to do so while earning 3%+ interest. Each month, we put aside savings money in our budget and then transfer the funds from our credit union main account to ING. It is great knowing the money will be there when we need it.